I was speaking with my sister this morning and wondered if I was correct that there is something unique about poverty in America. It started with my stating, apropos I don’t remember what, that smaller government is safer government — the mere fact that it is small limits the amount of mischief it can do to individual citizens. My sister agreed, but added “if government is small, it also limits the amount of benefits it can confer.”

What my sister was speaking about, of course, are social services. Some see them as a necessary safety net, some see them as a perpetual welfare program, and some see them as a beneficial way to redistribute wealth. I’m actually not here to argue about the merits or demerits of America’s social services. I want to head in another direction entirely.

My response to my sister was that, yes, government can confer benefits, but those benefits invariably come with strings attached: Increased government control over people’s lives (“He who pays the piper calls the tune”), increasingly intrusive government, corrupt government, power-hungry government, etc. In any event, I argued, government benefits never raise people above a bare minimum.

If you want to find the best way to raise people out of poverty, I said, look to the free market. At no other time in history, and in no other place, either in the past or the present, have more people been raised up than those people who have benefited from the last 150 years free market enterprise in the Western World.

In America, especially, poverty — real poverty of the type that people experienced historically or that people still experience in the Third World — no longer exists. To the extent that there are people who live in the streets, who go hungry, and who lack clothing or other care, you’ll invariably find mental illness or substance abuse attached.

I meant to include this video in my Robin Thicke Blurred Lines post, but forgot. Thankfully, considering how often I forget things, I’m comfortable having “better safe than never” as my motto.

As you watch the video, keep in mind my point, which is that Robin Thicke’s song is consistent with the societal mores the Left has brought to America. Or as Bill C elegantly stated, “Blurred Lines is just a song about seduction just like songs of the past. But seduction has a different flavor when promiscuity is the default position of society.”

Please be aware that this video has a lot of graphic language, so don’t watch it at work or when children are within hearing range. Having issued that content warning, the kicker at the end makes it worth watching.

Bear with me here hear, because I’m doing the blogging equivalent of thinking aloud. I was at the post office today in my friendly little Marin town. Unlike the rest of Marin the postal workers are not friendly. They’re not actively rude, but they are surly. Also, as always, the line was slow and long. The office is set up to have four windows open, but only one was operational.

I actually understand the open windows reflect staffing problems. Nevertheless, it’s profoundly irritating to see the implicit promise of those empty clerk windows. Incidentally, in my entire life, and we’re talking post office visits going back to the 1960s, I’ve never seen all windows operational. Some loony architect must have designed post offices with a sense of goofy optimism that, by throwing in extra windows, people would actually get served more quickly. What my “n” of one says (“n” being my lifetime of experiences in Bay Area, Austin, and Dallas post offices) is that the delays and under-staffing are not the result of the chronic deficit afflicting the post office. Email hasn’t brought the service to such a sorry point. It’s been this way for at least 40 years, through boom times and bust.

But back to my thinking aloud. Where was I? Oh, right. Long line, one clerk. The one clerk is a Chinese man who speaks what used to be called in the bad old days of racism “pidgin” English. It’s totally workable, but it’s sufficiently minimalist and accented that you need to be fairly alert to catch what he’s saying. Other than the communication problems — which are rather significant, really, when one considers that his job is to communicate with customers — it’s clear that this guy knows his job. He rings things up, stamps them, tells users which forms to use, etc., all with aplomb, confidence and, of course, surliness.

Today, though, there was a problem. A very elderly man, quite deaf, and barely standing (owing to the fact that, as he told the clerk, he’d just been released from the hospital after getting a hip replacement) needed an envelope and a stamp. He did what people used to do in the old days, when the post office was full service, rather than barely service: he asked the clerk for an envelope. While pointing to a wall behind the shrunken, shaky old man, the clerk snapped back, “You get der. Envelope der.”

The man quavered again, “What? What are you saying? I need an envelope.” The clerk again snapped at him. “I no give envelope. You get der. Envelope der.”

Those of us in line waited with bated breath. What I assumed was that, after two, maybe three, rounds, the clerk would say, “Never mind. I get for you.” But he didn’t.

Just as I was ready to break out of my analysis paralysis (do I butt in? will it offend the old man? am I reading the situation correctly?), the gal in line behind me said loudly, “I know how it feels to have a hip replacement. I’ll get it.” She walked to the wall with the envelopes and, turning to the clerk, asked “Which one?”

At which point the clerk, obviously relieved not to have to deal with the man, snapped at her “Dat one. No! Dat one.”

Once the man had his envelope, things went a little better but I did what I usually do, which was to start thinking.

I’ve grown up surrounded by Asians. Not Americanized Asians, but people from mainland China or Hong Kong or Taiwan. One of the things one always hears about Chinese culture, going back at least as far as the romantic and often misleading Pearl S. Buck, is that the Chinese have a reverence for aged people. Watching the postal employee, I saw no signs of reverence, just irritation. At first I was inclined to attribute this to being a postal employee, but it occurred to me, looking back on my life in San Francisco, that Chinese people are often extremely rude to old people limited by physical frailty, or hearing and visual impairment. It seems that they’re not necessarily respectful of all old people, just of their old people.

I discussed this notion with my sister, and she said that, up in her neck of the woods in Oregon, the Chinese have an appalling reputation for elder abuse. I’ve heard similar things in the Bay Area.

So, a few random thoughts:

1. Was I witnessing the chasm between a society’s ideal and its practice?

2. Was I witnessing the destruction of a societal ideal thanks to more than 50 years of Communist rule?

3. Am I refining too much on a single postal worker, in an industry that, in my experience, is notoriously surly.

Incidentally, none of the other clerks I’ve dealt with at this same post office speaks English as his or her primary language. All of these front line clerks are extremely difficult to understand.

And then of course, the big question: What about our culture? Do we still have behavioral ideals? Is there a huge chasm between ideal and practice and, if there is, is the chasm attributable to 40 years of Leftism in the public square or to the usual gap between aspirations and actual deeds?

Your opinions would be very welcome.

BTW, I hope it’s not to late to say that I’m all good when it comes to Asians. In high school, I only had Asian friends, so much so that they and I used to joke that I’m honorary Asian. I hate the colors that they paint their houses (sorry, mustard puke or black just don’t work for me) but, as a culture, I admire their industry, their family values and, of course, their food. On individual level, some people are more or less nice, or more or less honest, or more or less interesting than others. I take ’em as they come.

School shootings aren’t new. But, Americans have owned guns aplenty for more-than 200 years of nationhood and it seems that we’ve never had school shootings as we have experienced in the past few years. Neither has the rest of the modern world, but school, church and shopping mall attacks have been occurring even in countries with the strictest gun controls (e.g., Scotland, Germany, Norway, Japan). What has changed?

How about “that which must not be named”?

The old-guard leftists of the Frankfurter and Antonio Gramsci (you can “wiki” those names) school knew that to fundamentally remake society, you first had to destroy the church, society and the family. I would say Gramsci and Frankfurter school alumnae have had a pretty good success record.

Ever since LBJ’s 1960s “War on Poverty”, families have been disintegrating. It started with the most vulnerable (inner city blacks, where now 70% of children have no fathers) and has now spread to white, non-Hispanic families (close-to 30% of children born out of wedlock). Often, children in such families are left largely unsupervised, grow up without good male role models and enjoy ready access to the most depraved pornography, graphic violence, weapons, drugs and other vices through the internet and their peers, starting at a very young and formative age. One can try to prevent their kids’ access to this at home, but how does one prevent them from going down the street to a friends’ house?

I couldn’t help but notice that the first media reports of the shooter (whom I refuse to name and help make more famous) mentioned a mother but didn’t mention a father. Sure enough, the latest reports by a British news outlet, The Daily Mail, are of a boy traumatized by a three-year old divorce. Why did he single out his mother as the first victim? We may never know, but I suspect that the divorce may have had something to do with it. We are also learning that (surprise!) the shooter was a compulsive violent-video gamer.

Youth and adolescence are a time when kids should be learning communication skills and how to interact with adults and peers. Instead, too many kids appear to be devolving into lonely social outcasts and losers (a non-PC term I use for emphasis only). Throw in mental illness, they can become dangerous (the source of much of this mental illness is a worthy topic in and of itself…but think about what hours and hours of sitting in front of a screen does to the developing brain of a young child?). These are the years when their neuro linkages are being formed.

The mass media and punditry immediately started talking about this shooter’s “obvious” mental problems, thereby anointing him a member of “victim” class and providing absolution for his sins. I don’t buy any of it. I can understand someone crazed with rage shooting their mother in the heat of the moment, but the premeditation and time the shooter needed took to travel to a school after killing his own mother and destroying young kids’ lives in psychopathic cold blood point not mental illness but a willing pact made with evil. It is evil, pure and simple, nothing less. At one point, this shooter was confronted with a choice and he chose evil. Why did he make that choice? Here’s a thought:

What are the cultural messages that get hammered into young kids’ brains today? There is no reward in elevation, but there is reward in depravity. Our mass media hammers into their developing brains, over and over again, that to be depraved is to be “famous”, a powerful siren’s song for lonely outcast kids. These kids know that the quickest way to fame and even fortune is to act depraved and to be guaranteed that their depravity will be broadcast widely over the internet and throughout the global media. Some of them grow into mega stars (I’m thinking of Rapper culture, Madonna, Lady Gaga and Jerry Springers as just a few examples), further amplifying the siren’s song. The mass media, vigilantly on the lookout for breaking news 24/7, is complicit in this, for it is the internet and mass media that provide monsters their 15 minutes of fame. Remember that the next time you look at how our TV screens extol depravity. Btw, if you doubt me about just how depraved our culture has become, then Google [game kindergarten killer].

Sorry to have to use the word “depraved” of course. In our Gramsci-Frankfurter culture, such terms are soooooo judgmental and we don’t dare to be judgmental, do we? Why, other people might not like us, a sentence worse than death for too many adults that never outgrew their adolescence.

So what do we do about it? We can start by focusing on our own kids, knowing that our obligation as parents is not just to love them but to build them spiritually into good citizens and to armor them against the bad influences in our imperfect world. We can extend support to single parents, especially those trying to work jobs simply to survive, and we help provide guidance to their kids. These are the days when wolves stalk a land in which too many people have forgotten how to recognize wolves for what they are. And, if you decide to have children, get married and stay married, so that you can nurture, protect and educate your children into solid citizens together. My very brilliant spouse, a middle-school teacher, tells me that she can tell right away when her students’ families are trouble by the way that the kids lash-out in school. She has already lost too many of her former students to drugs and suicide.

Rely on our churches? Maybe, but so many have become such weak tea. My own Episcopal church…part of the Anglican Communion that produced such great theological thinkers and moral stalwarts as C.S. Lewis (our patron saint, in my view)…has been complicit in this. It is so terrified of being perceived as “uncool” that it doesn’t dare attack popular culture or elevate its members above the culture…unless, of course, it is a soft target, such as those really uncool, nagging, square conservatives (a minority group of which I count myself a proud member). The sad fact is that my church, sadly dominated at the top by Frankfurter-Gramsci disciples, spends far too much of its time and effort huffing and puffing to keep up with the latest social trends in its frantic effort to appear cool and contemporary while pushing its “social justice” agenda. I don’t recall my church’s leadership ever raising a peep of protest against the depravity of contemporary culture. Excuses, yes. Protests, no. Quite the opposite.

One of my FB friends just shared an electronic ad from our church’s head bishop that includes scatological epiphets to get the message across. Soooo, soooo cool! So with it! Some churches are great builders of spiritual armor. Not this one. It prefers to be complicit with a depraved culture. It follows, it does not have the courage to lead. You may ask, of course, why I don’t leave this church, so I will answer that: because it is precisely there that I am needed. There are many good people there. I and others do speak out and try to nurture and strengthen our children with spiritual armor.

Is the solution to force honest citizens to surrender their weapons? That is thinking with the heart rather than the head. I am so, so totally against this. The solution to an outbreak of wolves is not to defang the guard dogs. In this age of the wolf, we need more guard dogs, not less.

The Connecticut school shooting could have been stopped right away had there been one or more people on premise with guns, a circumstance that today would land any would-be guard dog in jail without passing “go”. Chances are that, had the shooter known that the school was protected, he would never have dared go there. The only real defense against a gun…is a gun. Mass murderers tend to be cowards that seek out soft, undefended targets like schools and churches. Guns, like drugs, will always be available to psychopaths, criminals and terrorists. If not guns, there are always knives, automobiles, poison gas, molotov cocktails or fertilizer bombs. Taking guns away from civilians only creates a larger pool of defenseless sheep available for slaughter. One of my FB friends also suggested that only government and police should have weapons. Scary thought. Look around the world today: now, that is one very scary thought. Government and law enforcement magnets for wolves. But, then, this is how people who have never had to confront wolves perceive the world. Like the Hobbits of the Shire, content to eat, drink and be merry, free of cares. But, reality eventually intrudes and we cannot magically “wish” wolves away into oblivion.

Finally, there is one particular aspect of this that really, really bothers me: young kids for decades have been getting gunned down, knifed, beaten to death, suffocated and raped in our inner cities. But, other than perfunctory hand-wringing, we never saw an outcry against this compared to what occurred after this most recent shooting in a well-to-do middle class community. Gee, what could the reason for this be? Yup, you’re right.

We won’t change what appears to be happening with increasing frequency to our society until we decide that we will stand up and dare to speak out against the increased depravity of our culture. Definitely “uncool”, but we must do it…for all families, for the kids and for our future. Otherwise, it can only continue to get much, much worse. It is the age of the wolf.

I’m still reading scattered posts castigating Mitt Romney for being a bad candidate or running a bad campaign. I understand the need to analyze failures to identify remediable errors, but we’re making a huge mistake focusing on the end of the campaign, rather than the beginning. One could say the beginning of the campaign is the Republican primary that resulted in a nice, bland, classic Republican technocrat. It’s the voters’ fault Romney went head-to-head with Obama. But that conclusion still doesn’t reach far enough into the past to explain Romney’s failure.

Romney failed because the American public has been trained to vote against Republicans. This isn’t as random or obvious a thought as it seems (although I’ll concede that it is pretty obvious). It has special meaning for me, because I’m getting together with some conservative gals who have ties to recent Republican candidates. One of them is married to a man who, some time ago, tried to displace Lynn Woolsey in the House of Representatives. Woolsey will be retiring this January, but she’s probably quite satisfied that she can look back at decades of far-Left Progressive politicking in Washington. Two of the others with whom I’m lunching are gals I last saw at a lunch for Elizabeth Emken, who lost to Dianne Feinstein.

Wendell Willkie, another Republican candidate who looked as if he ought to have won.

Both Republican candidates were fabulous by any normal standard: intelligent, attractive, principled, and honorable. In the 1940s, they would have been central casting picks for the good guy’s perfect political candidate. Both of them ran against incumbents who didn’t even bother to campaign. I’m not guilty of hyperbole when I saw that. Neither Woolsey nor Feinstein did anything beyond putting up a few signs. Both women knew that the Republican candidates weren’t worth fighting.

Woolsey’s and Feinstein’s certainty — which proved to be correct — clearly wasn’t because the Republicans were lousy candidates. Woolsey and Feinstein could afford to do nothing because they knew that there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in Hell that California and Marin voters would vote for a Republican. The Democrat political takeover is so complete that even God himself, if he ran as a Republican, would lose.

The late, great Andrew Breitbart understood that the problem isn’t politics, it’s culture. Politics is just the final step in a culture’s trajectory. Roger Simon exhorts conservatives to focus on the culture and force a change as quickly as possible:

As the late — and increasingly lamented — Andrew Breitbart pointed out repeatedly, “Politics is downstream from culture.”

Just how downstream we saw in this year’s election. Virtually every accusation made by the left toward Republicans and conservatives (sexism, racism, greed, etc.) was prepared and nurtured in the realm of culture. That was the earth in which the lies grew and prospered. And those lies, more than any facts or policies, were responsible for a liberal victory in a year — with unemployment at 8 percent and a deficit at 16 trillion — that should have been a Republican rout.

Put simply, give up on the culture and you lose forever. (It’s hard enough with the media and the educational system rigged the way they are.)

So my point is quite simple. Quit bitching and start doing.

Roger’s right. Run for the local school board or town council (neither of which require you to state party affiliation). Get onto the community college board. Stop going to popular movies that have anti-American themes. You can live without seeing the latest action flick, but the movie producers cannot live without your money.

On Facebook and at parties, politely argue with vapid Progressive conclusions. I did so the other day on Facebook, and got an arch liberal to agree that the UN is a despotic organization that should be done away with. I don’t think he’d ever thought about that before. And I did it all by politely questioning conclusions that the Progressives in the debate couldn’t support and by advancing facts that they couldn’t deny.

We keep thinking that, because our ideas are sound, they don’t need explanation or promotion. In the meanwhile, the Progressive Left has long understood that, because it’s ideas do not work well in the real world, but only in the Petri dish of the Leftist mind, they can become ascendant only through relentless promotion. What we never realized was that most people don’t think, they just “know” — or think they “know.” But really, they’re just like a shopper buying one brand of peanut butter over the other because the brand she selects has a better jingle that has formed part of a permanent soundtrack in her mind.

We need to start jingling folks — every one of us, in every way we can. We can’t all be Andrew Breitbart, but we can be soldiers in his cultural army.

Maybe I’m in denial, but I’m feeling less depressed than I felt last night and this morning. Part of my more sanguine attitude is based upon a Taranto principle, which is that Obama now owns the events of the next four years:

Obama has spent the past four years explaining away his failings by essentially arguing he is the best of all possible presidents–that he has done as well as any man could given the “mess” he “inherited” from his predecessor. It is certainly true that he took office under adverse circumstances. But so will whoever takes office Jan. 20. In fact, things are about to get a lot worse because of decisions taken but deferred during the Obama years.

The mess today’s winner will inherit includes not only high unemployment and slow growth but impending policy changes that threaten to make those problems worse. On Jan. 1, unless Congress acts, the Bush tax cuts expire–or, to put it another way, “massive, job-killing tax increases” are about to take effect (that quote is from President Obama). If Obama gets his way–which he likely would if re-elected–Congress will forestall the hike only for taxpayers making under $200,000 or $250,000 a year. That would be good for those fortunate enough to have jobs, but it would not change the tax increase’s job-killing nature, as it would hit investors and small businesses hard.

Then there’s ObamaCare. Although enacted nearly three years ago, it was written so that most of its provisions would not take effect until the next presidential term. “The bottled-up rules to set up President Barack Obama’s health care reform law are going to start flowing quickly right after Election Day,” Politico reports. “As soon as Wednesday, the gears and levers of government bureaucracy are likely to start moving at full speed again.”

The scale of the messes Taranto describes makes it unlikely that Romney could have been a successful president. At best, he might have stemmed an economic or national security collapse, but I doubt he could actually have improved things. The systems for self-destruction — massive debt, vast entitlement expectations, ObamaCare beginning to weave into the warp and woof of our social and economic fabric, a dangerous world outside of America’s borders — are already deeply entrenched. Four years won’t fix them. (Which may be why voters ignored Obama’s empty 2008 promises and decided that he really need 8 years to fulfill the hope and change manifesto.)

But, but . . . what about Reagan? He also inherited a dangerous world and an unhealthy economy. That’s true — but he inherited a different ground game. Political correctness didn’t exist then. Skin color diversity (offset by ideological homogeneity) was at the beginning of its trajectory, not the peak. People still viewed government aid as something one first earned or, if one didn’t earn it, as something one accepted with some degree of embarrassment. Now, even with no pay-in, they view it as a right, with no shame attached. In Reagan’s day, our troops hadn’t been fighting a blood-and-guts war for eight years (as opposed to a massive Cold War chess game) against an enemy that neither the Republican nor the Democrat President willingly named. In Reagan’s day, the intelligentsia may have tried to downplay the Soviet Union, but ordinary people still knew that it was indeed the Evil Empire. Israel was still loved, not hated, so Americans supported a president who supported Israel.

So we have a problem with democracy. It’s not working or, more specifically, has been turned on its end, with the masses manipulated against their own self-interest, creating power elites similar to those described in Milovan Djilas’ The New Class.

How did that happen? I think many of us know there are three pillars of our own destruction: the educational system, the media and entertainment (the popular arts).

Those three areas are so corrupted those who legitimately are on the center-right (or anywhere close to it) will increasingly find themselves swimming upstream against a current so great who knows where it will take them. (Think Hayek, Orwell, etc.) We must address ourselves to these three immediately before it is too late. In many ways, it already is. Culture is the mother of politics and mother is turning into Medea.

Okay, fine. We fight the wars we’re given, not the wars we want. So here’s my thinking.

As I said, I’m less depressed than I was because I think our culture is such that, no matter who occupies the White House, bad things are going to happen. Really bad things, both with our economy and our national security. Seeing as I think the coming hurt is inevitable, I’d rather it happens on a Democrat’s than on a Republican’s watch. If I’m wrong, I’ll eat crow and begin to consider whether my political leanings of the past eight years have been a temporary aberration, and I’ll even contemplate returning to my liberal roots. (Unlikely, but if the next four years are an American boom time, we’ll all need to rethink our belief systems.)

Accepting the inevitable, how do we fight back? As polite conservatives, we’ve always tried to work through the ballot box. We’ve decried the bias in media (including PBS, which we pay for), academia, and education, but we really haven’t done anything about it. We tried to vote for people who would stop funding PBS and we whined on websites about the indoctrination at our children’s schools. We’ve still paid to watch movies and we tune in to TV.

We resent the system, but we work within in. For all that we talk about the ageless wonders of our Constitution and free-market principles generally, we are short-term thinkers, who keep believing (all evidence to the contrary) that we can kill the Progressive tree, not by attacking the roots, but by taking an axe to the tip-top of the tree through honestly brokered elections. The fact is that the cultural battle is so one-sided (against our side) that we’d probably lose even honestly brokered elections, ones that did not involve massive fraud and media malfeasance.

We keep doing trying the same failed tactic, even though we recognize that the strong Democrat victories resulted, not because the Left voted, but because they spent 60 years going after America’s social and intellectual infrastructure. The numbers of actual Lefties are probably pretty small; the number of people who have been taught to vote Democrat without thinking what it really means, is huge.

William F. Buckley figured out the problem in the 1950s and started a cultural counter attack, which ended with the Reagan ascendency. Whew! That was it. We won. Yay. We won forever. NOT. The Left never stopped its ground game. Indeed, during and after the Reagan years (including during the Clinton years), the hard Left consolidated its hold over cultural institutions. We just watched and whined.

We cannot do that anymore. For the next four years, conservatives need to stop worrying about this candidate or that candidate (which is all we ever do) and we need to start wooing the masses.

My friend Lulu, who comments here and who has been an occasional guest poster, called me today with a wonderful idea: Star Parker. Okay, you’re right. Star Parker is a wonderful person, not a wonderful idea, but she’s the symbol for my friend’s idea. We don’t need to run Star Parker for office, we need to run her for talk show host, a la Oprah. She’s engaging, approachable, intelligent, conservative and black. I hate to add the last, because I don’t like to judge people by the color of their skin, but I’m in minority. I live in my head, so I relate to people intellectually. Most don’t. They need other people to look like them in order to start feeling comfortable with their ideas.

The talk show idea, though is the right one. We know that most people aren’t high-level thinkers when it comes to politics but are, instead, low-level, emotional reactors. I do not mean that they are stupid. I just mean that, when it comes to politics, they engage in a non-abstract, non-theoretical, non-intellectual level. The old saying is that, if the mountain won’t come to Mohamed, than Mohamed must go to the mountain. We need to reach out to non-engaged voters by meeting them at their level, rather than insisting that they meet us at ours.

Admittedly, our conservative social infrastructure is limited. Liberals own the media and the entertainment world. But how did they get there? They pushed and pushed and pushed and pushed. We need to start pushing too. We need talk shows, even if they start on cable or internet. We also need to take a page out of the Leftist handbook and start using the courts. For example, Lulu suggested that, as taxpayers, we have standing to sue PBS to demand that, as long as public broadcasting gets public monies, it must devote 50% of its programming time to conservative programs. After all, for decades, simply because they rented public airwaves, TV and radio were required to be neutral. Why isn’t PBS?

When it comes to Hollywood, we need to come together an create alternatives. Stop spending your money on movies by people who hate us. Why are we doing that? And we should take the money we didn’t spend on the haters and invest it in movie makers (such as Declaration Entertainment) that will make entertaining movies that don’t hit us over the head with their message, but that feed it to us subliminally. (When we do make movies we always go for the iron hand, rather than the velvet glove). The Left figured this one out, as Ben Shapiro explains in Primetime Propaganda: The True Hollywood Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV. We too can change the paradigm without being obvious.

And why are we, who pay most of the taxes, allowing publicly funded schools to discriminate against conservative teachers? We sit back and cheer when an individual conservative teacher sues after being denied tenure, but we’ve never had a taxpayer suit saying that, just as student body’s have to be diverse, so should faculty — and that this diversity includes not discriminating against belief systems. In other words, we have to redefine diversity so that it encompasses ideology as well as (or instead of) skin color.

We also have to advertise ourselves better. As Romney’s campaign (and McCain’s and Bush’s too) showed, Republican political “leaders” find our ideology embarrassing and seek to wrap it up in gauzy, often impenetrable, platitudes. One of my readers, Fern, suggests that our campaigns have a musty, fuzzy look. The Left identifies us as backwards, reactionary, etc., and we yield. We’ve certainly given the Left linguistic control. They’re “Progressive” and “Forward.” We’re fuddy-duddy “conservatives.”

Obama, a child of the Left, understands that words matter, more than the fact that these so-called Progressives keep trying to recycle ideas that failed in all nations that have tried them. They’ve got the glamor and the gloss, and those gimmicks sell in a superficial world.

One of the first and easiest things we can do is to start with re-branding. Keep in mind that calling conservatives “right wing” harks back to the 18th century French parliament, when the non-revolutionaries sat on the right side of the hall. Is that how we want to identify ourselves — as relics of the ancien regime? “Conservative” too makes us sound like a bunch of reactionary codgers who can be painted as desirous of slavery (never mind that the Republicans freed the slaves), Jim Crow-lovers (never mind that Republicans opposed Jim Crow), and misogynists (never mind that Republicans are in the vanguard of fighting Muslims and Chinese Communists who treat women and girl babies like disposable property).

It turns out that, in a media rich world, Shakespeare was wrong. That which we call rose, by any other name does not smell as sweet. With that in mind, how about starting to call ourselves “Individualists” or “the Freedom Party” or something like that? Liberals successfully (and mostly under the radar) rebranded themselves as Progressives, leaving behind the musty Victorian taint of “liberalism.” If they can do it, why can’t we?

Truly, the wake-up call we received yesterday is not about 2012 or even about 2016. It is about our finally understanding that the opposition has long had a better strategy and endless institutional patience. We won only when there were still enough voters who hadn’t been indoctrinated. In 2008, there weren’t enough of us remaining to tilt the scales. The Left attacked America at the root, and we need to take it back at precisely the same level.

The battle is over. The war has begun. Consider this post Ground Zero. If you have ideas — practical, non-whining ideas that ordinary people can put into effect — post them in the comments section, and we’ll see how far we can disseminate them. For starters, I am no longer a conservative. I am an “individualist” who supports a “Freedom Party,” as opposed to a “statist” who supports “Big Government.”